"It's hard to find good news in a hurricane," said Edward Overton, an environmental chemist at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. "But it's not all death and gloom."

"Eggbeater" Hurricane Winds Can Break Up Oil

Powerful hurricane winds can act like eggbeaters, tearing big pools of oil into smaller globs, which are more palatable to oil-eating microbes, according to Siddhartha Mitra, an organic geochemist at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.

Though oil-munching bacteria are abundant in the Gulf of Mexico, the organisms can't penetrate solid sheets of oil, and so they chew only on the edges of oil slicks.

Breaking oil into smaller pieces allows the bacteria to attack oil globs from all sides, making the microbes "fat and happy," LSU's Overton said.

More manageable pieces of oil also boost the rate at which dissolved oxygen in seawater can chemically weather the oil, changing the crude's properties. Over time, weathering can reduce the oil's overall toxicity, East Carolina's Mitra said.

One of the few known examples of a hurricane helping an oil spill occurred in 1979, said Chris Hebert, lead hurricane forecaster for the private forecasting company ImpactWeather, based in Houston, Texas.

That year winds from Hurricane Henri scoured clean most of the Mexican beaches stained by the Gulf of Mexico's Ixtoc oil spill, Hebert said by email.

But the impacts of hurricanes on oil spills is still poorly understood, noted East Carolina's Mitra, who warned that any predictions are "guesswork" at best.

Hurricane's Negative Impacts on Oil "Far Worse"

Overall, ImpactWeather's Hebert cautioned, "the negative impacts [of a hurricane] would likely be far worse" than its upsides.

For example, just the threat of a hurricane headed directly for the oil spill site would shut down efforts to control the oil still spewing from the damaged Deepwater Horizon wellhead, he said.

LSU's Overton also pointed out that any benefits from hurricanes hold true only for oil "meandering" far offshore. Nearshore oil, which is already creeping into Louisiana's marshes, will likely be pushed farther inland by tide surges, he said.